Suppose we wish to store “Hello”. We may either store it in a string or we may ask the C compiler to store it at some location in memory and assign the address of the string in a char pointer.
char str[ ] = “Hello” ;
char *p = “Hello” ;
There is a subtle difference in usage of these two forms. For example, we cannot assign a string to another, whereas, we can assign a char pointer to another char pointer. This is shown in the following program
main( )
{
char str1[ ] = "Hello" ;
char str2[10] ;
char *s = "Good Morning" ;
char *q ;
str2 = str1 ; /* error */
q = s ; /* works */
}
once a string has been defined it cannot be initialized to another set of characters. Unlike strings, such an operation is perfectly valid with char pointers
main( )
{
char str1[ ] = "Hello" ;
char *p = "Hello" ;
str1 = "Bye" ; /* error */
p = "Bye" ; /* works */
}